Location: Abandoned Bio-Reclamation Facility – East of San Francisco
Time: 2:11 AM
The compound loomed like a fossil of forgotten science—half-buried, overgrown with ivy and silence. A rusted sign creaked in the wind, once reading CELEN Biotechnics – Western Research Annex. Nex stood thirty yards out, unmoving. From a distance, he looked like a statue. Up close, his pupils danced like dark stars—constantly flickering with micro-movements, calculating not what is, but what could be. His mind no longer processed in linear steps. He saw architecture as logic and the wind as variables. Every detail was a gateway to outcomes and angles, dominos waiting to fall. Where others saw a door, he saw four entry vectors, six outcomes, three fatal. Where others waited for confirmation, he already heard the echo of a gunshot that hadn't happened yet. He approached the compound slowly and silent, more like a hunting predator than a human. This wasn't caution. He wasn't afraid of what was inside. He was focused on who would try to follow.
The entryway was overgrown, the keypad cracked open like a ribcage. Nex hadn't planned on using the door anyway. He slipped behind a collapsed irrigation tunnel, crawled twenty meters underground, and emerged through a pressure hatch most systems didn't even register anymore. The interior smelled of ozone and old bleach. Cleaned once and then buried ever since. Dust danced in the light of his lensless AR visor—though he barely needed it anymore. His mind could see everything. Psychological simulations ran in the background of his thoughts like human decision trees filled with probable enemy movements. Dialogue branches, stress response patterns, neural micro-responses extrapolated from old case files and gait footage. He was reading the intent of the space.
He passed through the outer corridor, noting subtle cues:
• A smeared thumbprint where no one should've touched.
• Scuff patterns that suggested hurried bootwork—recent.
• The faintest electromagnetic shift in the far wall—a hidden relay, still pulsing.
Not long before his arrival, someone had been here, but they were either gone now or hiding. He paused in front of a steel vault chamber that was cauterized around the edges from old thermal breaching attempts. The power was back on now, producing a slow heartbeat behind the walls. Someone had reactivated this place that knew he'd be coming. He stepped into the central data hub and found the console waiting—alive. A single black screen lit up as he entered the room, a solitary line of text appearing without prompt.
You're not as predictable as they thought.
Nex stared at it. Then, for the first time, he replied aloud, voice calm and razor-sharp:
"They never think far enough."
In the silence that followed, he felt it again, a tremor in the air. The presence of a system stretching.
He was inside the trap, and he chose to stay. They'd seen what he did to their strike team and must have assumed it was a fluke, some type of twisted luck or anomaly, but they were wrong. At this level, luck was a myth. He was sure they'd send more of them, stronger and better armed. They'd underestimate him again and it would cost them, because Nex wasn't on a level playing field anymore with men or even strike teams. What CerebrumX gave him put him on a mental level above nations. He was something else now and someone was about to learn just how big a mistake it is to try and control a ghost.
Location: Bureau Field Office – Evidence Review Room B
Time: 4:16 AM
The overhead lights buzzed faintly above the table between Mara and Kwan. Between them was a battlefield of discarded wrappers. Half-eaten cheeseburgers, two crumpled fry bags, a scattered mess of ketchup packets, and two large coffees that had long since gone cold. A half-dozen case folders sat untouched beneath the wreckage. Behind them, the screen was frozen on a single frame. Nex, standing in a clearing, calm and unflinching, looking directly at the camera.
Kwan took a bite of his chicken sandwich like it had personally insulted him. "Okay," he said, mouth half-full. "Let's review. We get a ghost-coded video of a man who dismantles a black ops team like he's brushing lint off his shoulder. No ID, no metadata, no source trail."
Mara stirred her coffee absently with a cold fry. "Then we get another from an abandoned research site about breached containment and one spoken line: I'm coming."
"And now," Kwan continued, "Miles finds a compiler ID embedded in the shell code of the video; a CELEN biotech variant. Like someone slapped a Made in Regret sticker on the side of the footage."
She almost smirked at that.
"CELEN," she said, leaning forward. "Same group behind CerebrumX. Same shell tech we saw in the failed trap."
Kwan nodded, wiping his fingers on a napkin. "So whoever sent this didn't scrub the file properly."
Mara shook her head. "No, they wanted us to find it. Miles said it was buried deep. Too deep for standard systems, but just shallow enough for someone like him to catch."
"A trail," Kwan said. "Fake-clean. Just enough digital dust to leave a scent."
She gestured to the screen. "But Nex didn't send this."
Kwan frowned. "So we're looking at a third player?"
"Feels like it," she said. "Someone who had the footage. Someone who couldn't stop him. So now they leak it to us and hope we can."
He leaned back and stared at the paused image. "You ever hear of someone reverse-baiting the Bureau?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Use us as a weapon? Only once. It didn't end well for anyone."
Kwan pushed aside a folder. "This compiler ID is the smoking gun. Whoever sent this is either sloppy… or they wanted to look like they weren't trying too hard to hide."
"Desperate," Mara said. "And dumb. If Nex is what they say, then trying to turn him into our problem doesn't make them clever. It makes them scared."
Kwan studied the frozen frame on the monitor. "We're staring at someone who walked through a kill zone and sent a silent message by existing in the right place at the wrong time. That's not just power."
"That's control," Mara muttered.
She looked at the fry in her hand.
Put it back.
"I don't know what scares me more," she said, "that someone out there thinks we're a threat to him…"
She trailed off.
"Or that he doesn't."
Kwan was quiet for a long moment.
Then, softly: "Who is this guy?"
Mara didn't answer.
She didn't know.
But if someone out there thought this was her problem now, she had every intention of making it theirs.
---
Location: Bureau Field Office – West Wing, Evidence Intake Lab
Time: 5:52 AM
Mara sat in the glow of the terminal, eyes bloodshot, her posture tense and folded inward. The image on the monitor didn't waver. Nex was frozen in perfect stillness. Mid-stride, unarmed, and unbothered. A moment pulled from a video that had dismantled more than just a strike team. It had cracked the foundation of what she thought was real.
Kwan leaned over her shoulder, arms crossed, jaw set. The facial recognition software had completed its run two hours ago with zero matches. There was no registry or criminal record. No military or civilian archives. Not even redacted trails in foreign systems.
"Still nothing," he said.
"Not even a maybe," she replied.
He nodded toward the screen. "He's not off-grid. He's something built to never touch the grid at all."
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "A ghost with a face."
Before he could respond, Mara's phone buzzed across the table.
Incoming Call – Internal Extension – Analyst 2nd Class: Lydia Doyen
She picked up. "Cale."
"Agent Cale, it's Lydia, from Analyst Services," came the voice, urgent but composed. Lydia Doyen had been Mara's go-to for quiet audit threads. She was discreet, sharp, and annoyingly good at finding things no one was supposed to.
"I'm listening," Mara said.
"You asked for hard confirmation of any CELEN-Bureau crossover points tied to CerebrumX," Lydia continued. "I pulled defense-side financial records we were allowed to store but never review. I didn't expect to find anything clean, but... I did."
Mara straightened.
Lydia continued. "The contractor CELEN used to source biometric containment modules for the Mojave site was also tied to DARPA subprojects labeled under neuromorphic enhancement trials. Black budget. Originally shelved under Project Hawthorne. But here's the kicker. It all routes back to a single code name."
Mara looked over at Kwan. "Let me guess."
Lydia's voice dropped.
CerebrumX. Confirmed. CELEN didn't just contain it. They helped build it.
Mara stood, the pressure rising in her chest.
"Print everything. Encrypt it. No digital backups. Deliver it direct."
"Already moving."
Click.
She set the phone down and exhaled slowly, then looked at Kwan.
"We knew CELEN ran the site. Now we know they were part of the origin."
Kwan nodded grimly. "That makes this a lot dirtier."
Mara walked back to the monitor. Nex's face stared forward, still frozen in motion. Controlled.
"They tried to create something," she said quietly. "Not just a weapon. Something more."
Kwan's voice was even. "And now it's alive."
She didn't correct him. Not this time. They both stood, preparing to go meet Lydia.
But somewhere deep in the Bureau's systems, a quiet alarm began to pulse.
An alarm no one programmed.